EA is reportedly making an online, open-world Star Wars game

Depending on your feelings toward Electronic Arts and Star Wars, the news that the publisher is working on a new open-world game set in a galaxy, far, far away may elicit joy or despair (or perhaps cautious optimism).

In any case, it appears to be true: EA is reportedly creating a “Star Wars open world” title, at least according to some job listings on the company’s website. A listing for a lead online engineer points to definite “online features and infrastructure” for the game, which certainly raises the possibility of persistent worlds and massively multiplayer crowds.

The full job description is as follows: “Lead a team to deliver online features for a Star Wars open world project. You will design, architect and implement the online infrastructure for the project while working with industry-leading central technologies. You will lead a team of engineers to accomplish the goals for the product as well as be an effective people manager to grow the talent on the team. You will report to the project technical director and ensure that the online systems are meeting the robustness and performance requirements.”

It is not that I believe any of that leading towards some epic Star Wars sandbox game (“open world”, as many here mentioned, indeed might mean something like Destiny). But at some point all those news will be true and we will get another SW game. Bound to happen.

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1 year ago

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ProphetPX

Maybe the old rumor about “SWTOR 2” was correct after all?
(There was actually an OLD Reddit thread about just this very same thing)

My first thought is this would be a Destiny clone, EA completely lack creativity so a clone of something popular is about right. But then I remembered Anthem. Whilst EA hate creativity, they hate risk even more so creating two big budget games (Anthem + this new one) based on the same genre and model would be too risky for them.

I think they’re too late to the survival party, plus Star Wars isn’t really the right setting for such a game.

So, my current expectation is something like a Shadow of Mordor or Assassins Creed type game. Open World but still story-focused. Then they’ll tack on some multiplayer aspect, probably not co-op as that’s too complicated, but something competitive with progression so that they can aggressively monetise it.

If they were trying to go all out, they’d aim for GTAV with a Star Wars skin. That way they get an awesome single player mode to attract the great reviews and restore our faith in the brand, but they also get to have the multiplayer aspect with which to print money. Of course, EA completely lack the talent to achieve this goal so they’d crash and burn….

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1 year ago

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MrNastyButler

EA needs to nail this and knock it out of the park. But I only have about 5% faith left to believe that will succeed. I’m expecting this to just be a battle royal style, open world game. EA can’t do inventive stuff and I doubt this game will be anything but inventive.

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1 year ago

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flyingltj

EA. Nuff said.

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1 year ago

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John Mynard

Heh, imagine a Star Wars MMO with modern graphics tech and a competently written ongoing story and a fair monetization model as SWTOR dies.

It’s possible, this is probably EA’s last chance to retain the license from Disney, they HAVE to get it right. Not saying they will, this is EA after all, but I’m optimistic and give it 30/70 split in favor of them succeeding.